Information Overload

Discussion

Information Overload as a result of Attention Freedom

= The issue today isn't information overload, but information underload. [1]

Mike O'Malley:

"A woman in a farm kitchen had a LOT to consider–just mak­ing a cook­ing fire took con­stant atten­tion, and infor­ma­tion about the kind and qual­ity of the wood, the spe­cific char­ac­ter­is­tics of the cook stove, the nature of the thing being cooked.

The mod­ern cook flips on the burner, and his or her atten­tion, freed up, diverts to other things. She or he has much less infor­ma­tion to deal with.

So what appears to us as “too much infor­ma­tion” could just be the free­dom from neces­sity. I don’t have to worry about find­ing and cut­ting and stor­ing fire­wood: I don’t even have to man­age a coal fur­nace. That atten­tion has been freed up for other things. What we see as “too much infor­ma­tion” is prob­a­bly some­thing more like “a sur­plus of free attention.”

As a his­to­rian, I no longer have to spend hours scan­ning texts to find the smaller sets of infor­ma­tion I need. They pop up quickly when I deal with dig­i­tized texts, and the search process is stream­lined and auto­mated much in the way a gas burner stream­lines and auto­mates a wood stove.

Just as the act of split­ting and stack­ing fire­wood has become a delib­er­ately anachro­nis­tic act, so might the act of split­ting and stack­ing ref­er­ences become less nec­es­sary. Do I still need to sh0w, piece by piece, what any­one can find in five min­utes? So what should our atten­tion turn to?

One answer might be that aca­d­e­mic his­tory becomes more and more con­fined to the undig­i­tized realm, the kinds of ques­tions that take you to archives that grow increas­ingly anachro­nis­tic and old fash­ioned: more and more peo­ple focus­ing on a shrink­ing body of mate­r­ial. Although we all value that kind of work, over­all that can’t be a good outcome." (http://theaporetic.com/?p=228)